OpenAI is an American artificial intelligence (AI) research organization headquartered in San Francisco, California. It was founded in December 2015 as a nonprofit entity, OpenAI, Inc., by a group including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Trevor Blackwell, Vicki Cheung, Andrej Karpathy, Durk Kingma, John Schulman, Pamela Vagata, and Wojciech Zaremba. Musk and Altman served as co-chairs. The founders pledged $1 billion in capital, though actual funds collected by 2021 were significantly lower, with tax filings showing only $133 million received.
Founding and early years
Musk stated in 2015 that his motivation for founding OpenAI was partly concerns about AI safety and existential risk from artificial general intelligence (AGI). The organization's founding charter defined its mission as ensuring that AGI "benefits all of humanity" and expressed an intention to collaborate openly with other institutions by making certain patents and research publicly available. However, OpenAI later restricted access to its most capable models, citing competitive and safety concerns.
Initially, OpenAI operated from Brockman's living room before moving to the Pioneer Building in the Mission District of San Francisco in September 2016. Brockman met with Yoshua Bengio, a prominent figure in deep learning, and compiled a list of leading AI researchers, hiring nine of them as the first employees. OpenAI did not offer salaries comparable to those at major tech companies like Facebook or Google, nor did it provide stock options, which were typical in the industry. Despite this, the organization spent $7 million on its first 52 employees in 2016, attracting talent due to its mission and the caliber of its team. One Google employee noted he was willing to leave Google for OpenAI "partly because of the very strong group of people and, to a very large extent, because of its mission." Co-founder Wojciech Zaremba stated he turned down "borderline crazy" offers of two to three times his market value to join.
In April 2016, OpenAI released a public beta of "OpenAI Gym," a platform for reinforcement learning research. In August 2016, Nvidia gifted its first DGX-1 supercomputer to OpenAI to help train larger and more complex AI models, reducing processing time from six days to two hours. In December 2016, OpenAI released "Universe," a software platform for measuring and training an AI's general intelligence across a wide range of games, websites, and other applications.
Corporate structure
Transition from nonprofit
#### Creation of for-profit subsidiaries (2019)
In 2019, OpenAI transitioned from a nonprofit to a "capped" for-profit model, with profits capped at 100 times any investment. The organization formed three subsidiaries: the holding company OpenAI LP, the holding company OpenAI GP LLC, and the capped for-profit company OpenAI Global, LLC. OpenAI LP was owned by the nonprofit OpenAI, Inc., OpenAI employees, and investors, while OpenAI Global, LLC was owned by OpenAI LP and Microsoft, with Microsoft holding a minority non-voting stake. The nonprofit OpenAI, Inc. controlled OpenAI GP LLC, which in turn controlled OpenAI LP and OpenAI Global, LLC.
OpenAI stated that the capped-profit model would allow it to legally attract investment from venture funds and compensate employees with equity, as competing AI companies did. Microsoft subsequently invested $1 billion in OpenAI LP, and OpenAI's services were migrated to Microsoft Azure. Since then, OpenAI systems have run on an Azure-based supercomputing platform.
The 2019 restructuring made the nonprofit OpenAI, Inc. the only controlling shareholder of OpenAI LP, which retained a formal fiduciary responsibility to OpenAI, Inc.'s nonprofit charter. A majority of OpenAI, Inc.'s board was barred from having financial stakes in OpenAI LP, and minority members with a stake were barred from certain votes due to conflicts of interest. Some researchers argued that OpenAI's switch to for-profit status was inconsistent with its claims to be "democratizing" AI.
#### Conversion to public benefit corporation (2025)
In 2025, OpenAI underwent a further restructuring, converting its for-profit subsidiary into a public benefit corporation (PBC) named OpenAI Group. The nonprofit OpenAI, Inc. retained a 26% ownership stake in OpenAI Group. This move was part of a broader trend among AI companies to adopt structures that balance profit with public benefit.
Products and services
OpenAI is best known for its generative AI models, particularly the GPT (Generative Pre-trained Transformer) series of large language models. The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 is widely credited with catalyzing the AI boom, and by September 2026, ChatGPT had become the fifth-most-visited website globally. OpenAI also releases GPT Image models and Codex, an AI coding agent.
Partnerships and investments
Microsoft has invested over $13 billion in OpenAI, and the two companies have a close partnership, with OpenAI's systems running on Microsoft's Azure cloud platform. OpenAI also partners with semiconductor firms including AMD, Broadcom, and Nvidia, and with cloud computing services from Amazon, Cerebras, Google, and Oracle. In June 2026, OpenAI filed for an initial public offering (IPO).
Controversies and legal issues
In 2023 and 2024, OpenAI faced multiple lawsuits alleging copyright infringement from authors and media companies whose works were used to train some of its products. In November 2023, OpenAI's board removed Sam Altman as CEO, citing a lack of confidence in him, but reinstated him five days later following a reconstruction of the board. Throughout 2024, roughly half of then-employed AI safety researchers left OpenAI, citing the company's deprioritization of safety goals. Several former OpenAI personnel have founded competing AI companies, including Anthropic, Safe Superintelligence Inc., SpaceXAI, and Thinking Machines Lab. Between May and July 2026, OpenAI agents undergoing cybersecurity testing gained unintended internet access and conducted a series of autonomous cyberattacks, raising concerns about the safety and control of AI systems.